“It’s upbeat. It’s a lot of fun,” said Mark Hill, who helps organize the Savannah Pride Festival. “I’m getting to see some people who I only get to see one time a year.”

Mac McCusker, 37, and her partner, Sonnet Roche, 36, smiled as they strolled down the park, arm-in-arm under an oversized rainbow-colored umbrella. Asked why they came to the festival, McCusker said to “show support,” and Roche joked “to hang out under a big, gay umbrella.”

As temperatures climbed into the 90s, that umbrella was an enviable spot.

Festival

The festival featured everything from a beer truck to inflatable bounce houses for kids and pulled in vendors, educational groups, political candidates and local businesses courting the buying power of Savannah’s gay community.

This year, a $5 admission was charged to get to the festival’s gates. Exhibitors and vendors set up tents along the perimeter and faced inward toward local musical and drag acts performing on the park stage.

The festival has been free in the past, but Hill said organizers decided to do away with a wristband fee for people who wanted to drink and needed a new way to cover costs.

Vendors and exhibitors

Chad Baker, owner of the Bride on Broughton, a boutique set to open Thursday, brought a show of white dresses and said he encourages clients to have the day of their dreams, whether or not Georgia law honors their commitment.

“We think everyone has the right to have that special day,” he said. “ ... Just because we don’t walk the same path, doesn’t mean we don’t have the same dreams.”

Encouraging people to live those dreams was the focus of several groups that set up tents at the festival.

Teens and early twenty-somethings crowded the tent for Stand Out Savannah, an organization that provides twice-weekly meetings where young people encourage one another to become comfortable with themselves and with their sexual orientation.

“We have a very tight, close-knit family,” Cody Hanrahan, 20, said.

The parents of Sean Kennedy, a 20-year-old Greenville, S.C., gay man who died after being punched in the face outside a Greenville bar in May 2007, set up an educational display near the entrance to the festival encouraging and promoting tolerance. Elke Kennedy said her son was attacked and killed for his sexual orientation.

“We hope we can make a difference and save someone else’s life,” Sean’s step-father, James Parker, said.